Mr. Kevin O'Donoghue:

Food waste is a really challenging area that we have been looking at for some time along with the EPA. The Bill gives us the authority to set out the food waste strategy or roadmap and the actions will come through that. A draft has been done. It has gone to colleagues in the EPA for their assessment and we will share it with others. FoodCloud is going to see it tomorrow. We will bring it to our colleagues in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and get a flavour from them as to where it should be tackled. It is a really complex area. The problem with the halving of food waste target is there are no baseline data yet. We have to set up a metric for that in order that we have a target to aim at. In the interim we will change some of the waste things very quickly. We will incentivise waste collection for commercial premises because they are not using a three-bin system currently so there is a huge amount of food loss happening there. In many respects it is not waste, but loss, because it is simply going into non-target materials and would be better composted. We need to start capturing the baseline data of farm, producer, retailer and consumer and establish where the losses are happening and where we can target them best. It is a much broader piece of work. The Bill is basically setting out a statutory requirement to deliver a roadmap and update it at a minimum of every three years.